Don't abolish teacher training allowance — GNAT
The Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT) has appealed to the government to reconsider its decision to scrap teacher training allowance.
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The appeal was made by the President of GNAT, Mr Samuel Doe Alobuia, at a press conference organised by GNAT in Accra yesterday to express the association’s opinion on the government’s decision to scrap teacher trainee allowance.
He said if the country appreciated the worth of education, policies on education had to be painstakingly formulated and implemented in such a way that the nation would derive optimum benefit, stressing "policies such as this one do not work in the interest of the education sector. They only create problems for the future ".
He said opting to teach at the basic level under precarious conditions in the numerous deprived communities in the country was enough sacrifice and the teacher should not start this work with a bag of debt.
He said unlike students in the universities and other institutions, who on completion of their course of studies looked for employment of their own choice, teacher trainees were prepared for a sole job of teaching in basic schools, and that those teachers were posted to places where their services were needed on completion of their course, stressing that the allowances bonded them to teach for a certain number of years.
“This ensures teacher retention in spite of the poor working conditions of teachers,” he explained, and pointed out that if the allowance was withdrawn and teacher trainees asked to go for a loan to finance their training, the Ghana Education Service (GES) would have no right to post the teachers and bond them.
"The repercussion will be that the teachers may not be obliged to accept postings to places the GES may want them to be and they can also leave teaching anytime, thus creating more empty classrooms," he said.
He said the GNAT found it difficult to understand how the scrapping of the allowance will "attract the best calibre of prospective students with passion for the teaching profession " as argued by the education ministry.
Support by governments
He said in Ghana, successive governments had supported teacher training education in various ways, leading to the setting up of 38 training colleges which have been upgraded as colleges of education, with the government paying the trainee teachers an allowance to be used in purchasing books and materials to aid their studies.
Mr Alobuia said it was strange how members of the teaching profession were made to suffer anytime there was budgetary constraints in the country.
He explained that after the 1966 coup that overthrew Dr Kwame Nkrumah, the National Liberation Council (NLC) cancelled the teacher training allowance because of budgetary constraints and many students who relied on the allowance for their schooling could not report to school, with some of them resorting to working on cocoa farms to raise money to enable them to go back to school.
However, the allowance was reintroduced in 1986 as a result of persistent pressure from GNAT and public-spirited Ghanaians who had the interest of the teaching profession at heart, and that action encouraged a lot more people to take up the teaching profession.
By Emmanuel Quaye/Daily Graphic/Ghana
